CBOSS puts out operator bait: Dinner date with 'booth babe' The quest for attention has ratcheted up a notch at this year's MWC, with CBOSS putting "booth babes" – the attractive staff at its MWC stall – on the table as dinner companions in the hope that someone will ask just what the company does. One of Mobile World Congress's most famous exhibitors has decided it's going to have to …
I've seen something similar at semiconductor trade shows. Didn't work. Attendees <s>didn't want</s> were too scared of girls to break the circle of gawkers to be seen (and photographed) publicly. The booth was bare.
FTFY
All I need now is for strikethrough to work (which it isn't in the preview).
Then IT also works for US2, b166er, and that is the Power Squared and the Force Eve NCubed and Encoded Decoded Sensitive and Top Cosmic Secret .
For all you Spooks pilots out here, can one fully expect some unnatural turbulence as old passions peak and are replaced with MKultra Sensitive Post Modern Hierarchical Infrastructure to Driver Raw Desire ...... Passion's Passions. Definitely Consenting Adult Territory there for all manner of private and pirate purchased/zeroday traded Treats and Trips into Treasured Temptations filled to Overwhelming with Perfect Transitory Satisfaction for Live Sampling....... where Virtual Field Novices Field Test with ProgramMING IntelAIgent Security Services, New LOVE Apps. which actually work incredibly well the more one surrenders oneself to submit and admit to the power of passions, which surely is what drivers Humanity?
Well, does it or does it not? And when IT does it, is IT Progress in a Colossal Quantum Leap? Yes, IT is.
For our trade shows we often have hostesses and even the occasional male host, but they aren't tarted up like some vendors do, they are just "wait-staff".
I remember being at IFA in Berlin a few years ago and seeing a stand where they provided the entertainment of a model being body painted on stage. There was no business reason for this other than the fact that their stand always had a gaggle of perv nerds, some with cameras in hand, standing watching a pretty girl in just a thong being painted.
That was a consumer show, at a professional show like MWC you shouldn't be attracting customers like this, you can have parties and ensure you have hostesses around, but deliberately pimping isn't professional especially where many of your customers might be married, or worse: female!
Calm down your outrage.
This is OSS being sold you know. An interaction with such a lovely sales lady may be more technical and more relevant to the product merits than the actual sales process run by most OSS shops and the telecoms operators purchasing decisions related to it.
On a personal note, when someone tries to sell via distraction (Software salesmen bearing rugby and F1 tickets...) it always makes me think they're trying to hide a shoddy product. As I don't like being treated like an idiot, they instantly go on my avoid list.
This is further reinforced when they use only female booth babes to sell, as it indicates they can't cope with the idea of women in authority. As I don't work, and don't want to work in a 'boys only' environment, I don't see how I can have a good professional relationship with people who hold half my colleagues in contempt.
So, for me personally (this is not a manifesto) this shit is counter-productive.
From their website:
"CBOSS (Convergent Business Operations Support Systems) is a transnational corporation and one of the world leaders in the development of innovative convergent IT solutions for end-to-end automation of telecommunications companies, delivering a competitive edge to telecoms across the globe."
Could mean anything, frankly.
Any business that relies on booth babes is not going to be taken seriously by me or anyone other than chauvinist dinosaurs. It hardly gives off a modern 'world leader' image.
Do they have male escorts also?
Perhaps they're not a telecoms company at all, but a clever* way around the stigma and legalities relating to escorts and prostitutes?
*well, clever compared to the particularly stupid village idiot of a particularly stupid village.
I was there, I saw that stand, and I thought it was pretty disgusting. I don't normally get uppity about these things but it was just insulting.
They had a number of admittedly attractive ladies doing a dance, and then handing out leaflets inviting you to dinner with one of them. It's about that point I realised that this was the ENTIRE stand. Literally. A space for the women to stand around like trophies, and then hand out what basically amounted to hooker flyers.
I don't actually have a problem with prostitution, but this wasn't a woman selling her own body/skills, this was representing a business at a trade show, and it was so blatant and out of place that it was insulting to both genders. Again, I was being advertised to as some knuckle-dragging simian who would do anything for the opportunity to motorboat some warm-bosomed filly, and the women were viewed as currency and nothing more. It was so backward I felt like I was expected to check their teeth first.
If I want a prostitute, I'll get one, but writing "CBOSS" on someone's tits isn't going to make me want to do business with you.
If the inviter was being paid to have dinner with the invitee then I would think it has always been dodgy ground. Prostitution is reputedly the oldest profession and I think you're probably looking through rose tinted glasses if you think that "how about a champagne dinner with this beautiful girl to discuss the contract" was ever anything but seedy and suggestive.
I live in Italy. I can see near-naked dancing girls any time I want* by just switching to a Mediaset TV channel like Italia 5, or (depressingly) even the nominally state-owned RAI channels.
Why bother with the trip to a trade show?
(Yes, I appreciate there's an "opportunity to win a dinner with a dancing girl", but as not even CBOSS appear to have a fucking clue what they do, I can't imagine how anyone else will. A competition nobody can win is what I call "a cheap publicity stunt".)
Seriously, even the bloody games industry has finally grown out of this puerile adolescent "booth babes" crap. Women use computers too now, you know. It's not even considered unusual today.
* (I wish I were exaggerating for effect, but I'm not. Berlusconi's old "Mediaset" TV channels seem to have a deliberate policy of including scantily-clad women in every damned programme they make. They've even managed to pad out their version of the vacuous "Deal, or No Deal" game show format to two full hours by throwing dancing girls and other irrelevant rubbish at it. Anyone in the UK who complains about the TV License really needs to see what life is like elsewhere—the Italians pay a TV license too, and it's not only more expensive than the British one, but the channels they fund still have adverts.)
It's so clear what they offer, how this kind of dirty stuff allowed in EU and at such level and event as MWC?
If someone still have doubt about "products" they offer, just check at CBOSS site
http://www.cbossgroup.com/news/article700933.html
http://www.cbossgroup.com/news/article700585.html
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